Porsches and Justice; Who Discovered Gandhi?

Of Porsches and Justice

Now the mother has been arrested. Apparently, it was her blood sample, presumably with no traces of alcohol, that substituted for her inebriated son’s. Said son, to recap, drove a speeding Porsche down Pune streets in the wee hours of a May morning, and killed two young people. Said son, presumed inebriated, and seventeen years of age, is neither entitled to a driving licence, nor does he possess one.

In tossing the said son’s blood sample into a dustbin of the Pune hospital, thus destroying material evidence, three people were implicated. Starting from the bottom of the food chain:

Atul Ghatkamble, a staffer at the Sassoon hospital morgue, from whom 50,000 rupees cash was recovered,

Dr. Shrihari Halnor, a Medical Officer in the Casualty department, from whom  2,50,000 rupees were recovered, and

Dr. Ajay Taware, Medical Superintendent of the hospital, whose consideration was not visibly expressed in cash.

Said Dr. Taware had been strongly recommended for this job by sitting MLA, Sunil Tingre, who also arrived at the accident scene at 3:30 a.m. The Indian Express quotes him as saying, “After I was informed by the police inspector of a serious accident, I told him to act as per the law”. 

Truly, the dedication of our public servants to the rule of law is admirable. 

The lad was produced before the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) the following afternoon, when  two applications by the Pune police were heard - that he be tried as an adult, and that he be sent to the remand home. Instead of its normal strength of three, the police were heard by a single member of the JJB, who granted the bail to said juvenile, subject to the harsh injunction that he write a 300-word essay on “Effects of road accidents and their solutions”.

And there the matter would probably have ended in pre-social media days. But the Porsche matter went viral. One Pune driver pasted a sticker in the rear windshield of his car: 

“ KEEP SAFE DISTANCE EVEN IF YOU CAN WRITE A 300 WORDS ESSAY”

A social activist staged a 300-word essay competition near the site of the accident, with topics such as, “What would I do if my father was a builder?”

The public pressure was unrelenting - videos of the boy and his friends drinking at pubs (yes, two pubs in one evening) crowded the internet; we even knew how much they spent. The Indian Express reported that Dr. Taware’s name had earlier arisen in connection with irregularities in kidney transplants.

The ripples of irregularity spread outwards - the owners and manager of the two pubs were booked for serving alcohol to minors. The builder-father, Vishal Agarwal, who has legal responsibility for giving a minor access to a car, went AWOL, and was arrested in Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, which you probably know as Aurangabad. Next, the grandfather was arrested, for kidnapping a family chauffeur and trying both carrot and stick to get him to ‘confess’ that it was he who was actually driving the Porsche. He did, but wilted under police questioning, and pointed a finger at the grandfather.

It takes a whole village - a thoroughly corrupted one, at that - to try and shield the sons of the rich and powerful. In this case, because of Punekar vigilance, it didn’t work, but for every such case where justice makes a brief appearance, there are, I warrant, scores where the matter is settled long before it reaches the court, or the headlines.

The crucial chain in the miscarriage of criminal justice is the police station. When case files are poorly prepared, by design or default, the court of law is forced to dismiss charges in the absence of proper procedure.

And then there is the even more noxious practice of entirely fabricated case files, prepared to incriminate the innocent. In connection with the Delhi riots of 2020, Article 14* reports:

“While discharging 11 Muslim men charged with rioting, criminal conspiracy and destruction of public property... a judge has found that the police had fabricated the case, using planted witnesses and concocted statements to frame nine of them.”

Over 60 such cases connected with the Delhi riots have been dismissed in the last four years. It is highly unlikely that the investigating officers (IOs) - who sit fairly low in the food chain - took it upon themselves to mass-manufacture a whole factory-worth of such cases. However, since it is the IO who signs off on the case file, it is he who must be held responsible for patently false cases. How is such an attempt to deceive the court any less grievous than the criminal conspiracy of which the innocent were accused? 

The loss of liberty to the scores of men thus detained, and the loss of livelihood for their families are an enormous cost to the individuals concerned. But the cost to society is far greater. The rule of law is the most vital underpinning of a modern democracy. And when it is miscarried, not by error of judgement, but by wilful, insidious intent, it eats at the legitimacy of the state. This is no less than an act of sedition - creating disaffection among a nation’s citizens, by those sworn to uphold its constitutional principles.

Punishment for such officers of the law is typically mild - a transfer, a brief suspension, maybe a delayed promotion. This is a profound injustice to the notion of justice. Deterrence is critical if we are to build legitimacy for the rule of law. If it is to work, it must be both appropriate and proportional. 

Police officers who conspire against citizens cannot be let off lightly. No more than a drunk, rich killer should be let off by writing an essay.

*https://article-14.com/post/delhi-riots-how-a-delhi-police-investigating-officer-framed-9-muslim-men-for-an-attack-by-a-hindu-mob-66569d8b05c28

Gandhi Before Attenborough

US Gandhi stamp - 1961

One of the many intriguing comments made by Prime Minister Modi in the last week of our elections was that Mahatma Gandhi was largely unknown until Richard Attenborough made a film about him. There have been many attempts to parse what lay behind Modi’s statement. Among those:

• He was not really important, only a film made him appear so.

• The Congress regime didn’t care about him, and it took a foreign film to give him his due.

• The inability of the BJP/RSS to diminish the tall shadow of Gandhi, despite their deep desire to do so.

In itself, I may not have had any reaction to this statement, but this tweet by musician Ricky Kej had me intrigued, since I’ve met him a few times, and he seems a reasonable guy: 

“After Gandhiji died in 1948, he was lost soon after from international consciousness. For the next 33 years (until the Attenborough film, that is)* he was very rarely spoken about or written about in the Western world…”

This was not my understanding of Mahatma Gandhi’s place in the world, but since he occupied a giant presence in my life, I realised I could be guilty of projecting my own view of him onto the rest of the world. So I decided to look for some facts.

The first one that I uncovered was that, in 1969, deep into Mahatma Gandhi’s supposed exile from international consciousness, forty countries published commemorative stamps on the occasion of his birth centenary. One hundred and fifty countries, from Antigua to Zambia, have put out at least one stamp featuring MK Gandhi. Given that there are only 193 nations in the UN in the world (195, if Palestine and the Vatican are included), 150 sounds like a huge number. 

I then examined Mr. Kej’s assertion that Mahatma Gandhi was scarcely written about during this time. I found a compilation of English books on Mahatma Gandhi; between 1950 and 1982, there were 467 books on Gandhi published in English. Of these, 60 were written by foreign authors.

I looked for similar lists in other languages, and found one for German. During the same period of his purported vanvaas from the world’s consciousness, 32 books on Mahatma Gandhi were published in German.

Enough time spent going down a random ferret hole: Gandhi was embedded deep in the consciousness of the 20th century, and I’m grateful to both Mr. Modi and Mr. Kej for helping me underline that I am not deluded in that belief.

*words in parentheses mine